210 
theatre: he rushed to the work with the 
avidity of a schoolboy to his play-ground, 
and threw away expenditure upon it as if 
his finances defied exhaustion. Instead of 
£6,000, he is said to have engulphed 
£30,000! This waste he has never been 
able to recover; and under the debt arising 
from his difficulties, he has now been com- 
pelled to relinquish his lease. It is im- 
possible not to feel regret for this termina- 
tion of his career. Whatever his caprices 
may have been, they have been of no dark 
and malignant dye; individuals must have 
suffered by his losses, but he has been ho- 
nest—no personal defaleation is laid to his 
charge, and he has fallen under no other 
imputation than that of a volatile and in- 
curable inability to do any thing like any 
other man alive. 
The sale of the lease produced a crowd 
of bidders; for there is nothing more cer- 
tain than the passion of men to dabble in 
theatrical management, except the con- 
tinual miserable anxiety and final ruin of 
the parties. Since Garrick, there is no 
instance of a fortune having been made by 
theatres: they are proverbially the very 
seats of chance; or if there be any thing 
like regularity in their course, it is that 
the profits of a successful seasen are re- 
gularly extinguished by the ill-suecess of 
the season that follows. Garrick’s case 
was an exception; he was in himself a 
tower of strength ; an actor such as Eng- 
Jand had never seen before, but, what was 
still more important, a man of prudence ; 
a quality that since his time seems to have 
been incompatible with the name of m@- 
nager. Garrick died worth one hundred 
and fifty thousand pounds. All the ma- 
nagers in England, at this hour put to- 
gether, are probably not worth half the 
money; yet there is scarcely an instance 
in which the failure is not to be accounted 
for, from errors and absurdities which could 
scarcely have been committed in any other 
course, or by any other men. One has 
flung away his funds on the gilding of bis 
theatre; another on making a Coliseum, 
where a house the fourth of the size would 
have held all his audience; another on 
buying an estate with the money wanted 
for his nightly expenditure; another. has 
flung it into acanal; and it is said to have 
cost Coyent-Garden eight thousand pounds 
for the building, and permission to build 
the mere portico of the theatre! For the 
honour of having an Athenian fagade, 
which was to have the honour in its turn 
of facing the alehouses and cookshops of 
Bow Street! Such is the wisdom of the 
Richards and Romeos of mankind. The 
fortunate purchaser was Mr. Bish, who, 
as the Marquis of Hertford shrewdly ob- 
served to him, ‘ having got rid of one 
lottery, had taken another.’’ The wits 
said that, haying lost the hope of having 
M. P. to his name in one way, he was 
determined on having it in another, and 
that “ Manager of a Playhouse ”’ would 
‘i Monthly Theatrical Report. 
(Ave. 
fit him just as well. But “ Lucky 
Bish,” as he calls himself, appears to have 
lost his luck with his lottery. His par- 
liamentary speculation might have» been 
escaped by knowing the difference between’ 
a contractor and a non-contractor; and his— 
theatrical speculation, by knowing whether 
he was in earnest or not. It has at length 
been relinquished ; and here we think, not- 
withstanding the loss of his £2,000 de- 
posit, he may resume his old title of 
“Lucky Bish”’ again. The parliamentary 
affair still, it is true, lies in ambush against 
his purse, and he may contrive to expend 
more than his theatrical deposit before he 
comes to the knowledge that he had better 
have let it alone. But if a man is born to 
live and die in hot water, it is useless to 
struggle against fate, and in hot water he 
must live and die. 
The Haymarket Theatre has had nothing 
new, or nothing worth remembering. Paul 
Pry, the epitome of village vulgarity, has 
caught the rabble, and Liston has played 
in it until he has worn out his face, and 
been compelled to go to the country to 
manufacture it again. ‘’’Lwixt the Cup 
and the Lip,” and an occasional new actress, 
or new and feeble farce, have appeared ; 
but the house has been in general thin, and 
has waited for its filling for the return of 
Liston, and the now tiresome repetition of 
Paul Pry. The Lord Chamberlain, that 
Jupiter tonans of the drama, who issues 
his incontrovertible decrees from his ineom- 
prehensible tribunal, and fulminates from 
his closet the laws of stages and stagemen, 
has lately issued a law by which the winter 
theatres. are to be restricted to nine months, 
and the little Haymarket is to live but four. 
Little Morris is indignant abeut this, and 
says that he wishes the Lord Chamberlain 
would let him return the compliment. But 
these are mysteries beyond our reach, and 
we leave their arrangement to the angry 
personages in question. George Colman, 
still junior, and still the deputy licenser, 
has committed no violence of late on hap- 
less authorship. Terror of the retribution, 
which his supremacy has so long deserved, ~ 
has given him another fit of the gout, and 
under cover of this he is inaccessible to 
the wrath of Mr. Moncrief and others, of 
whose free speech he has clipped the wings. 
It was particularly observed, that from the 
time of a certain female dramatist’s arrival 
in town, George, who is, after all, a man 
of personal prudence, retired from the 
ways of men; never ventured out till after 
dusk ; and has allowed of no female visitors 
without a previous search for concealed 
arms. He has by these precautions  hi- 
therto escaped vengeance for *‘ Cromwell,” 
but, until the lady’s return to her paternal 
mansion, is determined not to see the face 
of day. Ha Aree. Cy ts 
It is understood that, as the occupation 
of his retirement, he has been for sometime 
compiling a dictionary for the express use 
of dramatic writers. In this all obnoxious 
hidgqe 
——_—  —_— eo 
